My wife is the crafter in the house, and I am more of an ideas/concepts person. I have aided her on some of her projects, but am not really into crafting. So, long story short, after seeing some examples from previous swaps, I had an idea for something unique, but my wife had other ideas. Hence, she forced me to do my own crafting. Hehehe.

The concept was to not necessarily alter the art, but turn the art into something functional. So, I found this print of a sea scape at one of our local thrift shops. It was a pretty good find, considering the thrift shops here don't have too much variety. Since the picture was a sea scape, I went to Michaels and bought some stickers, shells, and charms. I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and bought a small lamp shade. Here is a picture of my starting materials.

For the lamp shade, I peeled off the fabric, so that I would have a template to trace onto the picture for cutting the picture to fit the lamp shade. After cutting the picture to fit, I hot glued the picture to the bottom of the shade, pulled the picture taut, and hot glued the picture along the top of the shade.

Once the picture was affixed to the shade, I hot glued shells along the top and bottom of the shade, to give it some type of border. I had originally thought about beading, but decided against that, and kept with an ocean theme. At this point, I wasn't quite happy with the product because it was a little too plain. So, I went and bought some Sea Oat like plant from Joanne's. I trimmed the oats to size and hot glued them along the bottom of the shade. Then as a finishing touch, I took little charms (starfish, shells, seahorses, etc...) and hot glued them between the oats.

So, here is the finished product.

This first picture is with the camera flash on. This is so you can see the details.

The second picture is with the camera flash off. As you can see, it looks like a sunset, and you can still make out the landscape from the painting.